


Tears

by Missy



Category: Lucky - Britney Spears (Music Video)
Genre: Coming Out, Fame, Growing Up, Hollywood, Yuletide Madness 2015, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 03:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5524244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why would a teen megastar cry herself to sleep each and every night out of loneliness?  </p><p>Everybody has their reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tears

**Author's Note:**

  * For [athersgeo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athersgeo/gifts).



_Lucky! A Star for Today! A Star For Always!_

The Magazine cover’s screaming her awake, blaring headlines in that cigarette-smoke scented tone that will always remind the girl of life under the Hollywood microscope. Those words are a lot to live up to. She sometimes wonders if she should bother trying to do it. But she looks at her family and knows that she has to.

It was a Cinderella story; she’d heard that little lie spoken often enough. The little country bumpkin who’d been picked up from the dirt, dusted off and given a new name. Erline had died sitting next to her mama in a casting agent’s offer; long live Lucky - one name. All the good stars only needed a single name. 

The lessons come next – the painful ones of separation and the ones that force her to hone her craft. They shove words between her pretty painted lips and expect them to spill back out in the perfect order, the perfect way absolutely every single time. It’s exhausting but she drives at it, the words an ax, hawing her way through the deadwood to a better, easier, richer life.

YYYY

The first movie is a bomb, a take on the old teen beach movie genre. She wears a bikini and plays an innocent too naive to notice the cute boy who’s had his eye on her since they were in diapers. Years later audiences will review that thing and call it a cult classic; right now, though, it’s a painful humiliation that she wants to forget.

They don’t give her time to dwell – her agent, her directors, or her mother. She gets pushed into the next role, this time the demanding part of a heartbroken teen runaway who copes with the death of her brother by abusing alcohol. She hits paydirt; the critics start whispering, the directors start calling. The next picture is so much fluff but it’s also a breakthrough – everyone associates her with a type, pegs her as a downtrodden teenager who perseveres through the power of laughter and determination.

The one after that cements her in the pantheon, brings her to the upper echelon. She plays a bitter, vengeful junior assassin seeking to kill the man who murdered her father. She hooks up with a man half her age who teaches her how to shoot and how to taste blood. 

The rest of the pieces fall into place rapidly. The Golden Globe nomination. The Oscar nomination. The victory, the tears and the joy. 

She only notices her own loneliness when the parade ends, when she’s stuck in her trailer for hours with a salad and the next script. 

It seems that there’ll always be another new project in the pipeline now. Always a new girl to portray and a new experience to churn her way through. And always a new flock of studio-assigned boyfriends who date and then dump her in a carousel-like fashion.

They don’t know, and she barely knows, that there’s something much more important that she’s almost dying to taste. Something bolder than fame and freer than love. Something hotter than hell and cooler than Iceland. 

Something called love.

YYYY

Her agent, she knows, must dictate who she will date, for the most part. Mostly boys with chiseled jawlines and bristle haircuts, and droopy pants and leering grins. To say she’s not particularly interested in their charms is beside the point; she’s barely interested in their gender, let alone the politics of their romantic. But she’s a good actress; she puts on a front and kisses like she means it in front of Koi, by the front door of the Belagio, under the stars in France. Then the boys go home, and she’s alone with her assistant.

The woman is older, smarter, and her frank grave face appeals incredibly to Lucky’s lack of worldly experience. It’s not long before they end up in bed, rolled up together, holding on through the black nothingness in the night.

Eventually her agent finds out. Eventually there’s only so much she can cover up. 

Lucky will lose many more assistants that way as time progresses.

YYYY

The day she decides to come out she has to arm-wrestle her agent for the phone, has to do a lot of talking with studio heads and record label heads and people she will never like but people she will also never owe again. She can’t win the five/ten split and goes to Vancouver with her latest “close personal gal pal" for a shoot.

She wonders if she’ll ever own her own life.

YYYY

When she’s forty, when nobody cares, when she has an EGOT, she finally gets her own say. The exclusive is painless. She comes out of People’s offices dancing.

And the magazine doesn’t blare back at her about her superstar status, her awards and cars. It doesn’t talk down to her about the level of fame she owns.

It says instead “Lucky Lives Her Truth.”

**Author's Note:**

> Queer!Lucky popped into my head out of the blue when I read your prompt, so I couldn't resist following that inspiration. Hope your Yuletide was merry.


End file.
